The Magnificent Magnolia...

Back in Cornwall, the grand magnolia tree that I have known for a large part of my life was out in bloom, its imposing saucer-sized flowers with their distinctive petals, looming out against the night sky, like exotic, ghost-like birds, roosting in the branches. Scattered on the pavement below lay the strange petals and pod-like buds that had been blown down by the relentless gusts of wind that had buffeted and beaten the boughs and branches. 

Fortunately, this enabled me to take a closer look at the curious forms of what happens to be one of the oldest and most primitive species of flowering plant on Earth. Indeed, in a sense the magnolia is a living fossil, dating back to the Cretaceous period, some 100 million years, when dinosaurs still roamed! As such, this ancient plant enables us to get insight into the evolution of the angiosperm (the flowering plant). 

The petals have a curious wax-like appearance, yet to touch are far less delicate than expected – with a certain density and an almost rubbery texture. With their somewhat robust nature, they seem more susceptible to bruise rather than break or tear under extreme weather conditions. 

Meanwhile the closed buds resemble over-sized, excessively bristly almond drupes or even elongated kiwis, but once the encased petals have burst out from their confines, the scales of these curious pods split open in a dramatic fashion.

The cupped, curving petals are in fact ‘tepals’, a distinctive feature of ancient flowering plants such as the Magnolia, wherein the petals and sepals are not clearly different. Nestled in the heart of these is the reproductive system of the flower, namely the stamens and carpels – the male and female parts respectively – spiralled around a central cone-like structure. Such a simple arrangement is relatively primitive in terms of botanical evolution and evolved to be pollinated by beetles – one the earliest pollinators – as opposed to bees and butterflies.

The leaves are large and glossy with a fuzzy underside and their dark mysterious green adds an atmospheric note that was not lost on Daphne du Maurier. The gardens depicted in one of her most famous novels  – Rebecca (1939) – feature these grand ornamental flowering trees in the de Winter estate, their presence reinforcing the rather oppressive, haunting mood that shrouds the grounds and house and proves to be inescapable to the young heroine of the plot. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”. 

The fragrance of the flowers is slightly overbearing, like Rebecca’s lingering scent “a stab of perfume in the air”, again adding to the psychological unease, with elegant beauty linked to ambiguity, uncertainty and veiled threat. Hmm…. High time I went back to reading some Du Maurier!